GTA V hit PC last Tuesday, the 18th, after Rockstar dragged the release out for what felt like a year of "coming soon" tweets. I didn't actually get to play it until this past weekend, because the download alone ate most of Thursday night and half of Friday. My connection isn't great (I'm still on the same cable package I complained about back in the spring, 30 down if the neighborhood isn't hammering the node) and this thing wants something like 65 gigs before you even see a title screen. I sat there watching Steam's little progress bar creep along and genuinely considered driving to a friend's place with a USB drive.
And then, once it's finally installed, you get to fight the Social Club login. Rockstar's account system basically fell over on launch day, which apparently caught them by surprise even though this is a company that watches GTA Online buckle every single time they push a big update. People were locked out for hours. I got through around 1am not because anything got fixed, just because fewer people were awake trying at the same time as me. Not exactly a confidence builder for a game that leans so hard on its online mode.
Complaining aside, once it actually loads, it's kind of a different game. I put close to 80 hours into the PS3 version back when it came out in 2013, so I wasn't expecting to be surprised by the story or the map. What got me was the first-person mode. You can play the whole thing, on foot and driving, from inside Michael's or Trevor's own eyes, and it changes the texture of the game completely. Driving through Los Santos in first person at night, with the radio on, feels closer to actually being there than any GTA has before. It's a genuinely new way to experience an old map, not just a gimmick they bolted on for the marketing copy.
The Rockstar Editor is the other thing worth mentioning, since I don't think it's gotten as much attention as the graphics bump. You can scrub through recorded gameplay, pick camera angles, slow things down, add music from the in-game radio stations, and export clips. I spent an embarrassing amount of Saturday afternoon just messing around with camera paths on a car chase instead of progressing the story. If you've ever wanted to make your own dumb little trailer out of a game, this is the most accessible tool I've used for it.
Graphically it's a real jump from console, obviously, uncapped framerate and pushed-up draw distances and all that, though my card is a couple years old at this point and I had to back a few sliders off to keep things smooth in the city. Worth saying: this is one of the first times a "current gen" console game has landed on PC looking meaningfully better than the console version rather than just being the same thing with higher resolution textures slapped on. The PS4/Xbox One re-release came out the same day, and from what I've read the PC version is still the one to chase if you've got hardware that can handle it.
Mod tools aren't officially out yet, but people were already poking at OpenIV within a day or two of release, same as they did with IV years back. I have a feeling the actual long-term life of this thing on PC is going to be modding, the same way Skyrim's second life happened almost entirely outside Bethesda's control. Rockstar's official stance on mods has always been a little cagey, so we'll see how that plays out once tools mature.
Anyway. If you're thinking about the download, budget yourself a full evening for it and don't try to log in during the first hour after a patch drops. Everything else about it, I'm sold on.